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This article explores how the idea of teachers as agents of change is historically constructed through the institutionalisation, secularisation, and normalisation process of professional teacher knowledges. Authors comparatively examine eighteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy literary sources and nineteenth-century US documents on the formation and expansion of public elementary teacher education institutions. The analysis highlights two points. First, the focus of teacher training was changed from the religious tradition to secularised practices by adopting modern science in teacher education; second, the construction of professional teacher knowledges in the form of "teaching methods" made it possible for the teacher to be a social agent. Despite the differences in time and place, teacher education institutions during the nation-building periods commonly adopted and used modern science for teacher training, emphasising sensory knowledge and empiricism as alternative means of professional development. Highlighting the training of teachers through modern science and methodical practices as a normalising process to make the "ideal(ised)" teacher, this study shows how teachers were constituted as a profession for the nation, whose salvific agential roles still remained in the scientific forms of teaching methods and secularised notions of teacher agency.

From the vantage point of present educational policy, it appears fairly straightforward to seek the solution to felt social and societal crises in education. Hence, on the basis of this statement, education can be considered as the most suitable tool to repair a perceived damage or the most effective medicine to cure a diagnosed sickness. Through the lens of "crisis narrations" and their alleged call for more (or a different) structure, the paper seeks to trace the perception of education as a remedy back to the origins of Western (more precisely Austrian and US) mass public schooling. Hence, two case studies, namely the Silesian reformer Johann Ignaz Felbiger and the leader of the later US common school movement, Horace Mann, are used to undermine the thesis of a common pattern of education as a way to cure the alleged weaknesses and consequently to order the (perceived) mess. It is argued that in both, the eighteenth-century Habsburg Empire and the nineteenth-century US, constitutional mindsets, described as "deeply engrained ways of understanding the relation between the public and its institutions", (re-)defined public schooling as a remedy aiming to provide a better future for all the members of the society, independent of their social class.